Derrida, Hospitality and Virtual Community

To be presented at

Derrida, Business, Ethics

Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy

University of Leicester

14-16 May 2008

Professor Lucas D. Introna and Dr Martin Brigham

Department of Organisation, Work and Technology

Lancaster University Management School

Lancaster University

LA1 4YX

Tel.: +44 (0)1524 65201

Fax.: +44 (0)1524 594060

Email: l.introna@lancaster.ac.uk

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INTRODUCTION

From the 1970s onwards, the term ‗virtual‘ was used to describe highly interactive

computer-generated environments such as the ‗virtual cockpit‘ used in military flight

simulators. By the 1990s, the term ‗virtual organisation‘ started to appear in management

magazines and journals. Indeed, many contemporary management writers claim that

developments in information and communication technologies of such as electronic mail,

groupware, the internet 2.0, blogs and social network sites herald unprecedented new ways of

working. For some Second Life is considered a powerful driver towards the creation of virtual

communities more generally. There seems no end to the enthusiasm for the virtualisation of

all aspects of sociality.

Williams (1976) states that the term community is used more favourably than

synonymous terms such as state, nation and society: community is often described as a

normatively ‗good thing‘ (Parker, 1998, p. 74). Indeed this normative value is implicitly

invoked by the ‗community of practice‘ literature—through notions of enterprise, learning,

sharing, etc.—as is reflected for example in the work of Wenger (1999). But what is

community? Current preoccupations with the level and degree of community (community

from the Latin communitatem and communis meaning common, public, general, shared by all

or many) associated with virtual interaction are, however, part of a long-standing

preoccupation in the Western cultural imagination and scholarly discourse. The concern with

a degradation of community is often articulated in conjunction with a narrative of modernity‘s

advancing economic and cultural globalisation, the de-traditionalisation of advanced

capitalistic societies and the temporal and spatial compression of interaction afforded by

information and communication technologies such as the Internet.

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Global, secular and technologically-mediated community becomes associated with

transient and multiple associations no longer fixed by the boundaries of the nation state, class,

race, family and locality. For some this is not a community at all but an expression of

heightened individualism and self-interest (see Parker, 1998). One response to such concerns

has been to suggest that, in advanced capitalistic societies, work organisations will become an

increasingly important source of identity and the fundamental basis for holding individuals

and groups together (Casey, 1995). Critics, by contrast, argue that the attempt to manage

organisations as communities is another control technique designed to foster ideological

commitment to the organisation (see Kunda, 1992).

Whatever the empirical evidence for such large-scale trends, and attempts to regain a

sense of community, the fragmentation, ‗shallowing‘ or ‗thining‘ of communities caused or

afforded by a technologically-driven globalisation is a concern of many and thus warrants

sustained discussion and debate. Our primary concern in this paper is, however, somewhat

tangential to those who are concerned with whether there has been degradation or renaissance

of community. We argue there is a broader opportunity to challenge the view of community

as premised upon a particular shared value—that is, community can only exist through the

inculcation and assimilation of others into the dominant concerns. Integral to this we are

interested in shifting the terms of the virtual community debate from community as

incorporation and coercion (with its implied ethic of reciprocity) to community as ethical

involvement rooted in our infinite responsibility for the Other. The conditions for doing this

are two-fold: questioning what constitutes community by invoking new analytical concepts

(in the work of Derrida and Levinas), and invoking the particularities of technologically-

mediated interaction (in for example e-mail interaction) in order to advance our argument. Put

another way, we are interested in posing the question of whether community be rethought

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from exchange relations and Sameness to ethical involvement and the Other? Most

importantly our concern is not purely intellectual (as interesting as this may be) it is also the

pursuit of a different ethic in the practice of ethics in the concreteness of an increasingly

virtual everyday organisational life.

The paper is structured as followed. From our concern to rethink the concept of

community we argue that the theoretical and ethical resources brought to bear on

understanding the concept of community can be furthered by a productive engagement with

recent work in continental philosophy, in particular the work Derrida and Levinas. We

mediate our discussion of virtually mediated interaction through some ‗empirical fragments‘

drawn from email communication between academics, administrators and students; we do

this not to be comprehensive of the range of communication possible through email, but to

exemplify lines of argument, particularly Derrida‘s concepts of cosmopolitanism, hospitality,

friendship and justice. Neither do we want to explain these fragments—to decipher what they

really say—although we speak to the fragments in the main part of the text of the paper.

Cosmopolitanism, hospitality, friendship, we suggest, can help us problematise virtually

mediated interaction and further the rethinking of the concept of community from Sameness

and assimilation to ethical involvement and the Other. Such encounters with the Other

become the basis for an ethical community—an ethical proximity—premised not on

assimilation and Sameness, but difference: what is shared is not the assimilation of the Other

or the Sameness of the community, but the primacy of the Other‘s singularity.

‘THIN’ VIRTUALITY, COMMUNITY AND THE STRANGER

The increasing proliferation of computer networks into everyday life is associated the

aspiration of reconnecting humanity and a multitude of new possibilities for humankind,

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businesses and society—virtual friendships, cyber-communities, virtual education, virtual

organisations, to name a few (Holmes, 1997; Poster, 2001). Some argue that virtuality extends

the social in unprecedented ways (Fernback, 1997; Rheingold, 1993a, 1993b; Turkle, 1995

1996; Horn 1998; Wittel, 2001), and that virtualisation opens up an entirely new manner of

social being—through the plasticity of the medium, it is possible for individuals to conceive,

construct and present their identity in almost boundless ways. Turkle (1996, p. 158), for

example, claims that cyberspace ―make possible the construction of an identity that is so fluid

and multiple that it strains the very limits of the notion [of authenticity]. People become

masters of self–presentation and self–creation. There is an unparalleled opportunity to play

with one‘s identity and to ‗try out‘ new ones‖. The claims by Rheingold, Turkle and others

are certainly bold. If they are correct, then virtuality may indeed represent entirely new

possibilities for human communion.

Phenomenologists, by contrast, disagree with these conclusions. They argue that social

interaction, identity and community (as we currently know it) are phenomena that are local,

situated and embodied, and are characterised by mutual involvement, concern and

commitment (Dreyfus, 1999, 2001; Borgmann, 1999; Ihde, 2002; Introna, 1997; Coyne, 1995;

Heim, 1993). In other words, that interaction, identity and community draw upon an implied

sense of involvement, place, situation, and body for their ongoing meaning. Borgmann (1999)

argues that the ―unparalleled opportunity‖ of virtuality suggested by Turkle comes at a ―cost‖.

To secure ―the charm of virtual reality at its most glamorous, the veil of virtual ambiguity

must be dense and thick. Inevitably, however, such an enclosure excludes the commanding

presence of reality. Hence the price of sustaining virtual ambiguity is triviality‖ (Borgmann

1999, p. 189). Indeed such ―fluid and multiple‖ identity is only feasible as long as it is ―kept

barren of real consequences‖.

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Similarly, Dreyfus (1999, 2001) argues that without a situated and embodied

engagement there can be no commitment and no risk. Thus, in such an environment, moral

engagement is limited and social relations, particularly toward others who are disembodied,

are trivialised and ethically insignificant. Ihde (2002, p. 15) does not go as far as Borgmann

and Dreyfus in discounting the virtual as ‗trivial‘. Nevertheless, he does claim that ―VR

bodies are thin and never attain the thickness of flesh. The fantasy that says we can

simultaneously have the powers and capabilities of the technologizing medium without its

ambiguous limitations … is a fantasy of desire‖. Phenomenologists suggest, then, that our

sense of community and the moral reciprocity it implies comes from a sustained and situated

engagement where mutual commitments and obligations are secured in proximity of

embodied co-presence—in the ―thickness‖ of flesh rather than the ―thinness‖ of the virtual.

Heidegger (1962) suggests that to be a community is to already share a world; to share

a world is to already have a horizon of common concern (of caring or mattering). Heidegger‘s

sense of community as a common horizon of significance can be extended to virtual

environments. Virtual communities are similarly communities in as much as those that

participate in them already share concerns (see also Burbules, 2004). Obviously not all

concerns are equal; some concerns are central and some peripheral. The more resources one

invests in a community the more one‘s identity becomes tied to the social objects of the

community and increasingly the durability of the community itself becomes a central concern

as such. Thus, as we would expect, not all virtual communities are the same. Some virtual

communities are ‗thin‘ because the participants only share peripheral concerns and are thus

not prepared to invest significant resources into the ongoing construction of shared

community objects to express and pursue their common concerns; as such the community is

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not, and does not tend to become, very durable. Indeed the durability of the community tends

not to become a concern as such.

Chat rooms and blogs can be ‗thin‘ or ‗thick‘ communities. They are not ‗thin‘

because they are virtual (Bakardjieva, 2003); they are thin if the concerns that constitute them

are mostly peripheral to the participants‘ identity. These so-called ‗thin‘ virtual communities

are often what commentators think about when they make critical comments about trivial,

individualised and non-committal nature of virtual interaction (Dreyfus, 1999, 2001).

Nevertheless, there are virtual communities that are relatively ‗thick‘. These are communities

where there is the sharing of core concerns, such as an illness, a collaborative project,

activism, and so forth (Feenberg, 2004; Kanayama, 2003). In these communities the identity

of individuals is often tightly connected with the identity of the community. As such the

ongoing durability of the community itself is a focal concern for the participants—it matters

to them in a very significant way, together with the community, their own identity is at stake.

Virtual communities are, nonetheless, different to those that are situated, embodied

and collocated in that they have much less resources available to express and secure their

identity through shared community objects. Their durability is always under threat: building

referentiality—an ongoing and particular horizon of meaning and significance—is much more

difficult to do. Thus, one often finds that these communities attempt to find additional ways of

‗grounding‘ themselves in situated, embodied and collocated spaces (such as occasional face

to face meetings, using actual names, referring to events and institutions ‗outside‘ of

virtuality, etc.).

The horizon of significance that constitutes the community (its referential whole)—

whether it is face-to-face or virtual—can also become a powerful set of prejudices (pre-

judgements or default judgements both positive and negative) that enables the community to

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‗define‘ and enact its identity. In and through this common identity there emerges, then, very

particular ways of getting things done. Such practices can also become powerful and

recalcitrant ways of excluding and discriminating against those considered ‗outsiders‘ or

‗strangers‘. We might say that xenophobia—fear of the strange(er)—is an ever-present risk

for a community. The stranger, the other on the outside, may become constituted as the enemy

that may disrupt the ‗homeliness‘ of the home and the self-certainty of the self. Conversely, a

stranger may seem to embody a special authority or see things the insiders cannot because

they are free of commitments and distant to local concerns—as in Simmel‘s (1971) essay on

strangers, which describes how Italian cities would call in judges from outside the city.

However, whether conceived of negatively and positively, strangers are associated with

assimilation projects, become scapegoats, or embody the properties of impartial observers,

rather than challenging the basis of community. We would suggest that the emergence of the

notions of trust and social capital (and its implied ethic of reciprocity) as a significant

intellectual focus in contemporary organisation studies literature may be seen as a

manifestation of this concern to domesticate (or not) the large numbers of strangers lurking on

the periphery of our increasingly virtualised organisations (Kramer & Tyler, 1996; Reed,

2001; Fukuyama, 1995).

Is it possible then to think through the relation between hospitality, the stranger and

friendship in such a way so as not to reduce community to shared values, that assimilates the

others into a new singularity—the friend into ‗one of us‘. Can I encounter the other as Other

in virtuality? Or do the conditions of virtuality mean that virtual communities will tend to be

‗faceless‘? We would suggest that in thinking through virtual communities we may be able to

problematize the assumed virtue of community and the ethic of reciprocity so prevalent in

contemporary discourse of organisation. We would further suggest that such ‗rethinking‘ can

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be done by turning to the work of Derrida and his writings on cosmopolitanism, hospitality

and friendship.

DECONSTRUCTION, THE VIRTUAL AND THE REAL

From Derrida, we can suggest that ‗virtuality‘ can be conceived as the ‗ground‘ on

which the difference between virtual community as limited and fragmented and the real as

shared face-to-face interaction is articulated. Derrida‘s philosophical and ethical project is to

locate, render visible and invoke responsibility for this structure of thought—virtual versus

real—through a ―deconstructive shaking‖ (Wigley, 2002 p. 42) in order to reveal the aporia at

the heart of its binary structure. Phenomenologists might suggest that embodied practices are

intrinsic to virtuality, but also argue that these have been largely absent from how our idea of

the virtual has been constructed. What is interesting following Derrida is that the virtual is

dependent upon and built upon the very absences it seeks to shroud.

Derrida‘s (2001) depiction of Levi-Strauss‘s bricoleur is perhaps his best known

critique of binary pairings. For Levi-Strauss the ‗bricoleur‘ is an inventive improviser who is

able to construct and elaborate meanings from dissociated and everyday sets of practices,

subjects and objects. The image of the ‗engineer‘, by contrast, is set in opposition to the

bricoleur—for the engineer embodies everything the bricoleur is not through an emphasis on

rationality, civilisation, rule following and, perhaps, a lack of imagination. Such acts of (total)

negation are at the centre of Derrida‘s philosophical and ethical writing—as the opposition

between bricoleur-engineer or real-virtual is a means through which a privileged concept—

bricoleur and real—is made possible by its complete other—the engineer or the virtual. At the

centre of oppositional pairings, for Derrida (2001 p. 360-1), is contagion and mutual

constitution, but ‗as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain

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bricolage and that the engineer and scientist are also species of bricoleurs, then the very idea

of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took meaning breaks down‘. If pairings

are always radically indissociable what might this mean for virtual forms of communication?

COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE VIRTUAL COMMUNITY

Fragment 1: Respected Teacher. My name is Saddam Hussain Rahim & I am doing PhD in

Management Sciences from Institute of Management Studies, University of Peshawar,

Pakistan…. Sir, I have completed the course work of PhD as well as the Advance Research

Committee of University has been approved my proposal. Currently, I am doing research on

my thesis under the supervision of Associate Professor Dr. Tanveer Abdullah. My Synopsis

title is ―Emotional Intelligence & Organizational Performance: An Analytical Study of retail

banking in Pakistan‖.

Dear Sir, due to broad exploration & gaining foreign teacher supervision in my research

activities, I would like to get an admission as a Visiting Scholar in your university for six

month. Please note that, this opportunity will be fully sponsored by Higher Education

Commission of Pakistan in which every thing will be included, i.e. Admission Fees,

Accommodation, living expenses etc.

Therefore I requested that please consider my application favorably & give me a chance to

got admission in your university as a Visiting Scholar.

‗A genuine test of hospitality: to receive the other‘s visitation just where there has

been no prior invitation, preceding ―here‖, the one arriving‘, says Derrida (2005, p. 1).

Hospitality as it is usually conceived is premised upon laws and principles of welcoming

others. For Derrida talks of unconditional hospitality as related to a democratic form premised

upon cosmopolitanism—in this lifeworld there could be no foreigner. Discussion of the

refugee or arrivant in Derrida‘s (2000) terms, as unconditionally welcomed, other than what

is expected or desired, is what Derrida poses as true hospitality—it is beyond debt and

economy as it is a gift that cannot be circulated or exchanged.

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It is perhaps obvious that the conditions of virtuality allows for members of different

communities to ‗encounter‘ one another in ways that are unprecedented in embodied and

collocated ‗face-to-face‘ communities. It also seems commonsensical that these encounters

will somehow be different from encounters in ‗face-to-face‘ communities. But in what way?

More specifically, in what way might it transform our encounter with each other as significant

Others? Are all others treated in the same way? Or some others more ‗alien‘?

Our discussion so far has emphasised how community, whether face-to-face or virtual,

is premised upon a shared horizon of concern rather than physical proximity (or closeness).

Families or colleagues may be ‗close‘ if they are a thousand miles away and our neighbours

or colleagues may be ‗distant‘ to me even if they are next door or in the next office. If we do

not already share certain concerns then virtual mediation will not create proximity even if it

does seem to ‗break down‘ spatial boundaries (see Virilio, 1995). However, communal

proximity does not necessarily secure ethical proximity—an encounter with the other as

Other. For Levinas, as we have seen, proximity is an ethical urgency that unsettles our

egocentric existence—we might say the communal proximity. Ethical proximity is the

facing—as a radical disruption of the Ego—of the Other that unsettles the ongoing attempts

by the egocentric community to ‗domesticate‘ the infinitely singular Other into familiar

communally assumed categories of friend, member, interest, concern, faith, ethnicity, gender,

to name a few.

In the face-to-face community the other seems close—one of us. However, this

closeness is constituted through the category of the Same (the common concerns of a

community). We are close because we share the same interests, friends, beliefs, and so forth.

Of course communities are not unitary, but in the face-to-face community there is a danger

that the Other may become domesticated through the categories of the Same, which constitute

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the community as such. The closeness and familiarity of the Same may circumvent the

possibility of the ethical disruption and the putting into question of the Same—the familiar

face of ‗the Same‘ may prevent the facing of the other as Other. Moreover, as suggested

above, the category of the ‗Same‘ of community proximity may render the outsider—one

could say ‗the third‘ in Levinas‘ language—as different, strange, even as the enemy. In

closeness and familiarity of the ‗Same‘ the question of justice (the third) might not disrupt the

Same.

It is possible that in the distant outsider there is a common enemy that may serve to

reinforce the category of the Same, making the possible disruptive force of the other even

more faint. Such an argument would suggest that the closeness of community may make

ethics, the disturbing presence of the other, more elusive in spite of communal proximity—

this may be so, but may also not be. In the closeness, the facing, of the face-to-face the other

speaks, quite forcefully, through the fullness of her expressive presence, as Lingis (1994, p.

33) suggests: ―With a look of her eyes, a gesture of her had, and a word of greeting, the other

faces me and appeals to me—appeals to my welcome, to me resources, and to my response

and responsibility. With the vulnerability of his eyes, with empty hands, with words exposing

him to judgment and to humiliations, the other exposes himself to me as a surface of suffering

that afflicts me and appeals to me imperatively‖.

The profound immediacy and inescapability of the other before me, here and now,

appeals to me in the full expressiveness of her being—even to refuse her would be to already

acknowledge my responsibility to respond. Indeed, in community, beyond the categories of

the Same the singularly Other can disrupt the self-certainty of the Same—but such ethical

moment will be in spite of community and not because of it.

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In, and between, virtual communities the boundary between the inside and the outside

is always at stake, continually disrupted as virtual strangers continue to ‗pop up‘ on our

screens. In the messages—signs and symbols—of virtuality those distant ‗outsiders‘—virtual

strangers—are brought closer, by unexpectedly and often without invitation popping up on

our screens. How might we encounter these strangers that are now so near? We might dismiss

them by simply ‗deleting‘ them. Within the limits of bandwidth and the systems of

representation these ‗outsiders‘ have extremely limited resources to appear to me as Other. In

the re-presentation on the screen there is no urgency to expose myself to the disturbing

particularity of this stranger facing me as a message on my screen. Rather my encounter with

the particular, now on my screen, tends to be in the anonymous category of the general:

another student from a university I do not know e-mailing me or just another message posted

on a virtual forum. The egocentric ‗I‘ could easily remain unchallenged and undisturbed, by

the outsider, the third, appearing on my screen. This is type of responsibility that takes the

form of ―the order of the possible, it simply follows a direction and elaborates a programme.

It makes of action the applied consequence, the simple application of a knowledge or know-

how. It makes of ethics and politics a technology. No longer of the order of practical reason or

decision, it begins to be irresponsible‖ (Derrida, 1992 p. 45). In virtuality the possibility for a

fundamental (re)consideration is so often circumvented because not all others are strange in

the same way. The very source of the ethical relation, the trace of the Other, that disturbs, that

calls me into question, seems to fade on the screen—a message to be deleted from an already

full inbox. For Ahmed (2000: 6) we must attend to ―the political processes whereby some

others are designated as stranger than other others‖.

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HOSPITALITY, THE VIRTUAL STRANGER AND THE GUEST-HOST

Fragment 2: In order to get in contact with a member of the academic staff it is necessary to

email a generic email address. The member of staff will then decide whether they can

respond to the email.

Fragment 3: Hi. With the dissertation, if I aim to email you a draft copy by monday morning

and if we set up a meeting for tuesday morning – do you think this would leave me enough

time to make any changes before the friday deadline? Regards,

In the disruptive presence of the stranger the question of justice becomes alive. How is

the stranger responded to? We should suspend our judgement and allow her in

‗unconditionally‘, as an act of hospitality. As Derrida (2002, p. 361) suggests: ―If I welcome

only what I welcome, what I am ready to welcome, and that I recognize in advance because I

expect the coming of the hôte as invited, there is no hospitality‖. The act of hospitality

constitutes the host and guest pairing, but it is only through unconditional hospitality that we

can face the other, as Other. However, for hospitality to be ‗hospitality‘ it must contain within

itself the irreducible possibility of hostility (hospitality and hostility share the same

etymological root)—without a boundary (and the possibility to enforce it) letting the total

outsider in ‗as a friend‘ would not make sense. In hospitality there is a paradox, the

unconditional is always already conditional.

But what happens once the ‗outsider‘ is inside? Does the outsider not simply become

an insider? Does the guest begin to take over from the host and place unreasonable demands

on the host? Derrida argues that hospitality can neither be turned into mere integration nor can

it simply remain unconditional. Hospitality is the ongoing ethical burden of community that

must be negotiated and invented every step of the way—this is Levinas‘ tension between the

ethical proximity to the Other and justice for all Others. The outsider will not remain an

outsider nor will she simply become an insider. This is her strength. And maybe this is the

property of all communities to one degree or another. Are we not always somehow ‗in‘, but

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not quite, and always somehow ‗out‘, but not quite? Is the problem of the ‗virtual stranger‘ on

screen not also part of the millennial old problematic continually working out, again and

again, who we are/to be—as individuals, communities, societies?

Is the possibility of ethical proximity, therefore, limited to the face-to-face

community? We argue that this is not the case. We have all experienced the disturbing

presence of a suffering face on television. The trace of the Other in the text of an e-mail

message has put us into question. Indeed sometimes the contextlessness of the message or

image ‗from nowhere‘ makes it difficult for me to simply dismiss it as this or that instance

in a category. Turkle‘s (1996) respondents often commented on the way they escaped the

prejudice (ethnicity, gender, etc) of their interlocutors in the anonymity of the text.

Sometimes we find that this lack of context takes us by surprise and arrests our being—

unexpectedly putting one into question. Am I not already responsible? This is the

irreducible imperative of the virtual stranger, popping up on our screens. The outsider

often enters as an other Other—the third. In disrupting our communal and ethical

proximity the third reminds us about all other Others—our humble relation to humanity as

a whole.

It seems to us that virtualisation has not changed such questions, but makes them more

explicit because unlike face-to-face interaction the virtual Other is elsewhere even if she is

treated like a neighbour (see Silverstone, 2004). More than face-to-face communities,

virtuality paradoxically forces us to admit to the stranger at the periphery that continually

unsettles what we so desperately want to settle. In the anonymity of the interface I have to

decide because the stranger can be easily ignored. As my inbox fills with many e-mails from

virtual strangers I have never met, I have to make decisions and even send replies that say

‗sorry, I can not help‘. Hospitality (or justice, in Levinas‘ terms) demands this of us.

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However, if I turn hospitality into pure calculation then the decision may be justifiable, but it

may not be just (Derrida, 1992). I cannot solve the problem of hospitality by setting up

filtering rules to deal automatically with all these outsiders ‗equally‘. In this sense we cannot

delegate justice to technology. As Levinas (1991, p. 159 states: ―Justice is impossible without

the one that renders it finding himself in proximity‖. Every ‗sorry, I can not help‘ message

must fill me with ethical trauma. Maybe this was an other like none Other, in desperate need

of unconditional hospitality. The morality of the in/outsider needs to be worked out without

being determined by a priori rules. Yet neither Levinas nor Derrida were particularly specific

about how morality would be worked through in practice. Both were, however, concerned

with invoking the undecidability of morality in the encounter with the Other—in contrast to a

calculative morality based upon reciprocity—as a way to invoke a response to the singular

claims of Others and to renewed ethical and political judgements.

FRIENDSHIP AND THE IMPERATIVE NOT TO COMMUNICATE

Fragment 4: At a coffee break at a conference, a presenter is talking to a group of attendees

at the conference. During the discussion the presenter says to one of the group that he‘d like

to continue the communication by email after the conference and asks for the person‘s email

address. He says that he‘ll add this email to his contact list as he only receives emails from

people in his contact list. All other emails are blocked, he says. The presenter says he can

only properly respond to quite small group of people in any given period of time, and if he

does not have contact with a person after a certain period of time they are deleted from the

contact list.

Fragment 5: Whilst in discussion with a colleague in his office, she is glancing at the screen

and responding to emails whilst talking. She is known for her tenacious ability to respond to

emails very quickly, usually the same day.

Fragment 6: Inbox - 8249 emails. Automatically generated message: I cannot reply to further

emails at this point as I have a backlog of emails to reply to. Please try again at a later date if

necessary.

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Derrida‘s writing on friendship is closely connected to his writings on hospitality and

the stranger; friendship has had a primary role in defining political thought and practice,

according to Derrida, where from the Greek polis onwards political activity is conceived as

comprised of men who share citizenship in common and who are bound together through

fraternal relations. Contra this image of kinship and affinity, Caputo (1999, p. 184) asks: ―Is it

possible … to think of a friend in terms of distance rather than proximity, in terms of

irreducible alterity rather than a community of shared concerns, in terms of strangeness rather

than familiarity?‖ Derrida‘s (1997) injunction is that friendship has to be rethought as an other

self rather than another self—a relationship to someone who is not me and whose difference is

in fact the precondition of friendship. What then does friendship mean in virtual community?

Because anybody can send me an email, without my permission but be expectant of a reply,

am I obliged to communicate to all who solicit my friendship?

Derrida‘s (1997) conclusion is we must relinquish attempts think to whom we are

connected by ―something essential‖ (Blanchot quoted in Caputo, 1999, p. 196). Rather we can

only speak to (to in the sense of a person to who we speak to) and not about a friend (in the

sense of what, the identity of the person, about which we speak). Friendship is then

something, very paradoxically, unshared and without reciprocity ―without all the hype of the

play of reflection and without brilliant display, in the unseen scene of an incalculable and

invisible gift. If there is one‖ (Caputo, 1999, p. 198). Friendship demands not reciprocation to

be friendship.

ETHICS, POLITICS AND JUSTICE

Injustice begins, for Derrida, from the start, at the ‗very threshold of hospitality‘. In

Levinas‘ terms the ethics of community start with the impossibility of being indifferent to the

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Other [Autrui]. In encountering the other as Other the ego becomes unsettled, shaken,

fundamentally and irrevocably interrupted. Our response-ibility—our willingness to respond

and be responsible—to and for the Other is infinite and without an expectation of reciprocity.

It is not an economic relation of exchange. It is a radical asymmetry in which the ‗I‘, the self,

the ego, does not even come up as a valid currency—our debt to the Other is simply without

measure. This profound encounter with the Other—being its hostage—which Levinas

proposes is very difficult to make sense of. Yet, in everyday life we are often disturbed.

Somehow we do encounter, as a profound disturbance, the trace of the Other; often

momentarily we become disturbed by the appeal in the eyes of beggar, the posture of the old

person, the words of the child, and so forth. Like the caress it ‗touches‘ us without touching:

―…what is caressed is not touched, properly speaking.… The seeking of the caress constitutes

its essence by the fact that the caress does not know what it seeks.‖ (Levinas, 1996a, p. 51).

How do we encounter (or recall) the other as Other? The Other solicits me in facing

me—this is a metaphysical face and does not have to be actual face, in Levinas‘ terms. This

‗facing‘ is not the facing or face-to-face of the community that I participate in: ―it recurs, it

troubles the rational community, as its double or its shadow‖ (Lingis, 1994, p. 10). The face

solicits us through its expression (Levinas, 1996b). However, in its expression the face does

not become present to us; rather the face is present in its refusal to be contained. It is a

solicitation, an invitation, and, more precisely, for Levinas a visitation. Nevertheless, it is not

an invitation to ‗know‘ but to ‗encounter‘. It is an encounter that shatters the system of the

singular and self(ish) absorbed world: ―in this beggar's solicitation, expression no longer

participates in the order from which it tears itself, but thus faces and confronts in a face,

approaches and disturbs absolutely‖ (Levinas, 1996b, p. 65). As the Other arrests me (it does

not always happen) I recall my excessive responsibility for this Other facing me—I must

19

respond. But what about all other Others not facing me? Am I also already responsible for

them? This is a matter of justice, or what Levinas terms ‗the third‘. For Levinas, ethics must

always be seen as one half of his philosophy, justice the other.

Levinas (1991, p. 158) argues that we cannot encounter the Other without immediately

and simultaneously being exposed to the claims of all other Others—‗the third‘ in his

language. ―The third party looks at me in the eyes of the other—language is justice‖.

(Levinas, 1969, p. 213). Thus, the face of the Other obsesses me both in its refusal to be

contained (rendered equal) and its recalling of the always already equal claim of all other

Others weighing down on me in this particular face before me. The weight of the

asymmetrical and infinite responsibility for the Other is ‗corrected‘—if one may say this—by

the simultaneous relation with the third party (1991). But does this not negate our infinite and

humble responsibility to the Other? Rather, morality has a ‗double structure‘. In the words of

Critchley (1999, p. 226-7): ―[M]y ethical relation to the Other is an unequal, asymmetrical

relation to a height that cannot be comprehended, but which, at the same time, opens onto a

relation to the third and to humanity as a whole – that is, to a symmetrical communities of

equals‖. It is exactly this ‗double structure‘, at the intersection between subjectivity and

governmentality, the simultaneous presence of the Other and all other Others that gives birth

to the question of justice. However, the urgency of justice is an urgency born out of the

radical asymmetry of every ethical relation. Without such a radical asymmetry the claim of

the Other can always, in principle, become determined and codified into a calculation—

justice as a calculation. Thus, justice has as its standard, its force, the proximity of the face of

the Other. Levinas (1991, p. 159) asserts ―justice remains justice only, in a society where

there is no distinction between those close and those far off, but in which there also remains

the impossibility of passing by the closest. The equality of all is born by my inequality, the

20

surplus of my duties over my rights. The forgetting of self moves justice‖. It is the

simultaneity of the face and the third, the singular and the category, ethics and politics that is

the most powerful of Levinas‘ thought. It is also this simultaneity that we want to use as the

conceptual horizon to examine face-to-face and virtual communities.

CONCLUSION

Derrida was very weary of terms such as community because a community knows its

boundaries before it lets other pass through its boundaries. Hospitality invokes, necessarily

therefore, relations of power, but that does not mean communities should not exist; instead,

Derrida ―calls for communities that are pressed to near breaking point, exposed to the danger

of the noncommunal, communities that are porous and open-ended, putting their community

and identity at risk‖ (Caputo, 1999: 187). The lack of a normative ground for decisions does

not, similarly, mean decisions about the practices associated with hospitality become

depoliticised. Rather the political is re-radicalised through ―new assessments of what is urgent

in, first and foremost, singular situations, and of their structural implications. For such

assessment, there is, by definition, no pre-existing criterion or absolute calculability; analysis

must begin anew every day everywhere, without ever being guaranteed by prior knowledge. It

is on this condition … that there is, if there is, action, decision and political responsibility –

repoliticisation‖ (Derrida 1999, p. 240 original emphasis).

We have argued that productive conceptual insights can be gained and new lines of

research can be opened up if we shift our focus onto hitherto taken for granted assumptions

and neglected questions about the nature of communities and the moral reciprocity that

community is often seen to imply. This paper has contributed to challenging modernity‘s

vision of community through an ethical and political vision of community based upon a

21

shared sense of the singularity of the Other. Our concern has been to shift the debate about

community from assimilation and coercion to ethical involvement and Otherness. In

particular, we have suggested that the concept of the virtual stranger can heighten the

problematic of community more generally.

An underlying implication of the argument developed in this paper is that assumptions

of community based upon calculative reciprocity and exchange that do not problematise the

ego-centric self are inadequate for understanding contemporary society. Nonetheless, re-

imagining the concept of community away from dominant approaches that emphasise

calculative reciprocity and inculcation will be a significant task and long-term endeavour for

the human sciences. For some it may constitute a major threat to the foundations of scholarly

inquiry. In concluding it is, then, worth emphasising that the disruption of the ego-centric self

by the Other does not mean that the concept of community has to be relinquished: an

encounter with the singularity of the Other is not the end of community. It is a new

formulation of community based upon the primacy of an ethical encounter with the Other.

The notions of ethical proximity and hospitality seem to offer a way of thinking

through community that is warranted at the beginning of the twenty-first century—it is

something we believe deserves sustained delineation. When we are disturbed by the face of

the Other ―a rebellion against injustice that begins once order begins‖ (Levinas quoted in

Hand, 1989, p. 242) can be set on its way. What is indexed here is the tension between ethics

and politics and this, Derrida (2000) suggests, brings forth a responsibility to intervene in the

form hospitality takes in the name of the unconditional because deconstruction is justice.

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